A Talent for Friendship

Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait

Professor John Edward Terrell

Challenges the Enlightenment "Hobbseian" view of human nature — that we are fundamentally violent and selfish creatures — and proposes one based on agreement and cooperation

Introduces readers to a novel way of thinking about how the human brain works, explaining why human beings resort to violence

Appendix contains a "how to do it" guide to hosting inter-community encounters that foster dialogue and understanding between communities

A Talent for Friendship

Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait

Professor John Edward Terrell

Description

This book frames our biological and psychological capacity to make friends as an evolved ability, comparing friendship to other evolved traits of human beings such as walking upright on two legs, having opposable thumbs and a prominent chin, and possessing the capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Professor John Terrell investigates how the human brain has evolved to perform two functions essential to friendship that, at first glance, appear to be at odds with one another: remaking the outside world to suit our collective needs, and escaping into our own inner thoughts and imagining how things might and ought to be. We must all deal with our species' hereditary legacy—that we are social animals who need to include others in our lives for our biological and psychological survival. Yet we are also able to exercise the cognitive freedom to detach from the adaptive realities and demands of life. These thought patterns have important consequences for how we understand aggression and cooperation. Terrell claims that conflict is best understood in terms of friendship—as challenges that emerge when we are forced to reconcile the inner, private worlds of our imaginations with the experienced realities of our daily lives and each other.

A Talent for Friendship

Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait

Professor John Edward Terrell

Table of Contents

Contents:Part I. What Makes Us Human? 1. Being Human 2. Baron von Pufendorf 3. Ghost Theories 4. The Secret Lives of Lou, Laurence, and LesliePart II. The Archaeology of Friendship 5. Suddenly All Was Chaos 6. A Wimpy Idea 7. In the Footsteps of A. B. Lewis 8. Confronting the Obvious 9. The Archaeology of Friendship 10. The Sign of the Sea Turtle 11. Drawing ConclusionsPart III. Selfish Desires 12. Houston, We've Had a Problem 13. You Can't Get There From Here 14. The Wizard of Down House 15. The Numbers GamePart IV. The Social Baseline 16. Animal Cooperation 17. The Question of Animal Awareness 18. Babies and Big Brains 19. Mission ImpossiblePart V. Social Being 20. Alone in a Crowd 21. A State of Mind 22. It's Who You Know 23. Bloodlust, Fear, and Other EmotionsPart VI. Principles To Live By 24. The Lady or the Tiger? 25. A Kiss is Just a Kiss? 26. Friend or Facebook? 27. What was the Garden of Eden like? 28. The Strength of Weak Ties 29. Meet Me on the Marae 30. Being in a Family Way Appendix Index

A Talent for Friendship

Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait

Professor John Edward Terrell

Author Information

Professor John Edward Terrell, Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural History, United States

A Talent for Friendship

Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait

Professor John Edward Terrell

Reviews and Awards

"Is friendship a transaction designed to smooth over our naturally brutish human nature? Or is it intrinsic to our being? Terrell, a leading anthropologist of Oceania and author of the seminal Prehistory in the Pacific Islands, offers a more complex answer... As a theory of friendship, Terrell's work is elegant." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY